Busy working…

Ryder Cup Washout – A Social Disaster and Victory All At Once !

My alarm woke me early this morning. Stupidly early. I was up at 1.45 – why go to bed? The reason was to watch Lee Westwood tee it up at Celtic Manor to try and wrest the Ryder Cup back from the pesky Yanks!

Living in the US gives you a different perspective of these events. Being behind enemy lines makes the event even bigger. Although if things go wrong, (thanks for nothing Robert Green), then it can be twice as painful.

At the time of writing, play has just resumed and the Cup is not likely to be won or lost until Monday!

But the big news of the day, is the rain in Wales. Not just the rain, but the failure of the rainwear chosen by Corey Pavin and the USGA, to keep the US players dry. Once the news was out that Tiger was soaked to the skin and Phil was dripping wet through, attention turned to the manufacturer of this equipment.

The fact that it was produced by a company called ‘Sun Mountain’, should perhaps have given Pavin a clue that these guys weren’t experts in wet weather clothing! The fact that the team then had to purchase new equipment in Wales, that wouldn’t have been designed beforehand, from a company called Proquip, meant that these two brands were suddenly all over the social web having quite different days!

Here it is happening before our eyes! Everything I’ve written about here before now is coming to pass!

Sun Mountain are suffering the worst possible PR disaster, whilst Proquip are basking in glory. And it’s being played out on social media.

Here are a couple of tweets:

“Probably the end of that company. Certainly the USPGA will never use any of their products again. #sunmountain“

“Let’s get some Proquip”

And it spreads wider – Goretex are forced to make a statement that they ended their relationship with Sun Mountain in 2006! Right now Sun Mountain are toxic!

Google news results for Sun Mountain right now and you can see what’s happening. As I’ve said before, “you are what Google says you are” and “you can’t take piss out of a swimming pool”!

If Sun Mountain employ social media listening tools, they will hopefully be on this, working throughout the night and the rest of the weekend to try and address things positively – quite how they do this, I can’t think right now!

Proquip on the other hand may also be listening in and their positive sentiment report will bulging at the the seams! Lots’ of ‘thanks guys’ and if you’re a retailer carrying the Proquip range, ‘here’s a voucher for online store with 10% off Proquip merchandise if you buy before….”, you get the idea!